Hector Aristizabal is my guest for another in the series Making a Conceptual Revolution, to take place on Friday evening March 17, 2017. A friend since Performing the World 2012, Hector travels the world bringing his story and gifts to communities beset by violence and trauma. While he's in NYC,...
Last month I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Burgert Kirsten for his regular podcast coming out of Cape Town, South Africa. Our topic? "Revolutionary Transformation Through Play." A coach (his company is called Liminal Transformational Coaching), organizational psychologist, improvisor and father of two young children, Burgert has quite a lot...
Fred Newman was a playwright and theatre director as well as a social therapist (and philosopher, community organizer and political strategist). He loved creating conversation on therapy and theatre. Here's excerpts from a class he gave on The Therapeutics of Theatre—in 2002, and just as relevant (maybe more so) 15 years later. My...
Last week, as part of their residency in NYC, the East Side Institute's International Class went from Manhattan to the South Bronx. They visited the Bronx Documentary Center and were wowed by the current exhibit. Entitled "Whose Streets? Our Streets!" the show features nearly 40 photographers whose images of demonstrations...
Groups. Individuals. Decisions. Descriptions. Science. Measurement. Therapy. Fred Newman brings them all together in "Undecidable Emotions (What is Social Therapy? And How is it Revolutionary?)". Here's an excerpt from the article published in 2003 in The Journal of Constructivist Psychology (Volume 16, pp. 215-232). You can read the article in...
From Patch Adams and the Gesundheit Institute: Hello my friends! Lots of people have people have been calling me and telling me how sad, mad, or angry they feel about the political discussion lately. While we here at the Gesundheit Institute do not want to weigh into political discussions, we would like...
Hello to my blog followers and fans of The Overweight Brain. If you live in the NYC metro area I’d love for you to join me IN PERSON for a Revolutionary Conversation on psychology’s glorification of the individual—taking place the evenings of Monday March 1 and 8 at the East Side...
For the next few months I’ll be using "Words to Ponder" to share some words of Fred Newman—the public philosopher, creator of social therapy, political activist, “architect” of a new progressivism, and my friend and intellectual partner for 35 years. I hope you are moved and/or provoked by them. The...
I want to introduce you to a unique activist-scholar community that played an especially important role in my development. It's the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (also known as LCHC or, simply, the Lab). Housed at the University of California San Diego since 1979, the Lab is a community of...
My call to action...